AirMagic for drone photography

Skylum is about to release a software, which is specialized software for drone photography. AirMagic is planed to optimize drone captures with the help of artificial intelligence.

Update

AirMagic is on sale now for 29,– € instead of 39,– €.

Introduction

Besides PhotoLemur now AirMagic will be the sesond piece of software, which is supposed to optimize captures from a drone with the help of AI and no intervention from the user. . The software will according to Skylum lead to ready to use images.

As i posted already in the last week review a comparism to PhotoLemur is justified, because the surface and the handling of the software is pretty much alike, so it might be a modified version of PhotoLemur.

The program

The program is available both for Windows and Mac OS systems and will cost 39,– €. The program will be relased on March 21st. The price is the same like PhotoLemur. Maybe it was due to the version i had the chance to take a closer look on, but just for downloading a 24 MB installer it took more than one hour. And we’re not talking about the time needed for complete installation. I suppose that this will change with the official release of this software. I presume that there will be test version available with the official release.

Results

To check out the qualitiy of the results i handled over a couple of DNG files from my DJI Mavic Pro over to AirMagic. I didn’t install the Lightroom or the Photoshop plugin because this way AirMagic would work on the processed images.

Just like in PhotoLemur first of all there is a analysis phase and then the result is presented in form of a before/after comparism:

With the brush tool you only can change the amount of the effects to the image. There are no further options ot process the image, just a couple presets are installed.

The result can be exported as Tiff  (8/16Bit) or for example JPEG:

The size of the exported image can be reduced to share the image on social media and you can save those changes as a new export preset.

Here is another example:

This looks pretty good at first sight

The comparism

Comparing the results from AirMagic to those of the Lightroom exports AirMagic gets almost the same image in terms of saturation, shadows and hilights of the image.

For an automatic image processing the result is pretty good and might be helpful for those who don’t want to play arround with a preofessional image processing tool. Even for an extreme situation AirMagic gives pretty good results:

But in this comparism the problem truly are the details. The detaisl and overall sharpness are better in the Lightroom export, because you can sharpen the image carefully before exporting it. And there are recognizable differences in lens corrections.

And there is another problem which isn’t handled by AirMagic. In particular with the above sunset image i had to open up the shadows pretty much. Because of the small sensors in the amatuer drones this will result in noisy areas. Even there still is noise in the Lightroom export, where i had to reduce the noise carefully not to wash out the details the AirMagic result is almost not usable without the option to handle noise in the image.

Conclusion

At first sight the results of AirMagic are very pleasing, but you’ll get better results even with Luminar 3 just by activating the SkyEnhancer and the AI Boost and there is still the option to sharpen the image and reduce noise in the image (and of course i have all the other options of a raw converter) . The program AirMagic will be available at 21st of March and can be preordered here. .

ciao tuxoche